AS TRIAL BEGINS, CHENEY'S EX-AIDE IS STILL A PUZZLE

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: January 17, 2007

Paradox seems to define I. Lewis Libby Jr., who remains a bit mysterious even to close colleagues. He is the White House policy enforcer who also wrote a literary novel; a buttoned-down Washington lawyer who likes knocking back tequila shots in cowboy bars and hurtling down mountains on skis and bikes; and a 56-year-old intellectual known to all by his childhood nickname, Scooter.

But now comes the most baffling paradox of all, as Mr. Libby, former chief of staff and alter ego to Vice President Dick Cheney, began his trial in federal court here on Tuesday on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. By all accounts a first-rate legal mind and a hypercautious aide whose discretion frustrated reporters, he is charged with repeatedly lying to a grand jury and to the F.B.I. about his leaks to the news media in the battle over Iraq war intelligence.

''I don't often use the word 'incomprehensible,' but this is incomprehensible to me,'' said Dennis Ross, the veteran Middle East troubleshooter who is now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. ''He's a lawyer who's as professional and competent as anyone I know. He's a friend, and when he says he's innocent, I believe him. I just can't account for this case.''

Among Mr. Libby's friends and former colleagues, the case brought by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, is considered not only unjust, but also a terrible irony.

''He's going to be the poster boy for the criminalization of politics, and he's not even political,'' said Mary Matalin, Mr. Cheney's former political adviser.

Critics of the Bush administration say nothing was more political than the administration's use of defective intelligence to take the country to war, in which Mr. Libby was deeply involved. At a time of deep public distress over events in Iraq, the trial will inevitably carry symbolic weight beyond the legal question of whether Mr. Libby lied.

He was ''Cheney's Cheney,'' in Ms. Matalin's words, ''an absolutely salient translator'' of the ideas of the man considered perhaps the most powerful vice president in history. Mr. Libby had a role in virtually every national security initiative of the administration's first five years.

It was Mr. Libby who helped assemble a dossier on Saddam Hussein and unconventional weapons and ties to Al Qaeda for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, fighting to keep in the speech evidence that Mr. Powell found questionable. It was Mr. Libby, at Mr. Cheney's direction, who repeatedly spoke to reporters to rebut Joseph C. Wilson IV after Mr. Wilson, a former ambassador, publicly accused the White House of distorting intelligence.

''Libby didn't plan the war,'' said John Prados, a historian of national security who wrote a book in 2004 on the flawed Iraq intelligence. ''But he did enable the administration to set out on that course. He was the facilitator.''

Both fans and critics of Mr. Libby might be surprised by some anecdotes from Yale, where Mr. Libby graduated in 1972. Fellow students recall his helping silkscreen T-shirts proclaiming ''solidarity'' between Yalies and the Black Panthers and going with shoulder-length blond hair and in a leather jacket to help at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration.

A couple of years after graduation, a classmate, Donald Hindle, met Mr. Libby, then a student at the Columbia Law School, and noted a decidedly nonpolitical talent.

''He could remember not only all 79 'Star Trek' episodes, as I could, but he knew all the titles, too,'' Mr. Hindle said. ''I think he always liked fantasy.''

Mr. Libby and his brother Hank, a retired tax lawyer, were the first in the family to graduate from college. Their father, Irve Lewis Libby Sr., had dropped out to support his family in the Depression. The senior Mr. Libby, who called his son Scooter after seeing him scurry about his crib, became a successful businessman. The family lived in the Washington region, Miami and Connecticut before Scooter graduated from the Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts.

At college, Mr. Libby began writing a novel, a mystery set at a country inn in 1903 in Japan, where he had spent the summer of 1969. He rewrote the book off and on for 25 years before it was published as ''The Apprentice'' in 1996, to glowing reviews (''a small triumph of meticulous craftsmanship,'' The Washington Post said), though after his indictment The New Yorker mocked its sex scenes.

Also at Yale, Mr. Libby took courses from a young political science instructor, Paul D. Wolfowitz, who became the chief intellectual theorist of the Iraq war. Seven years older, Mr. Wolfowitz was the critical mentor in recruiting Mr. Libby to the neoconservative camp, hiring him first in 1981 as a speechwriter and an Asia analyst at the State Department under President Ronald Reagan and in 1989 as a strategist in the Defense Department, headed by Mr. Cheney in the administration of the first President George Bush.

''He was fascinated by Paul's thinking,'' recalled a friend, Francis Fukuyama, who worked with him at the State Department. Some experts find the seeds of the current president's assertive foreign policy in a 1992 military policy paper that Mr. Libby helped draft.